The Cave by José Saramago
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Making Words Visible

A love story for the elderly? A Lovecraftian fantasy? A documentary about craft pottery-making? A family saga of Portuguese modernity? Well actually The Cave is all of these and more as Saramago crosses genre boundaries with his usual and unique style to create a remarkably readable philosophical novel. What binds the book together is Saramago's lifelong concern about words. The Cave is an exploration of how much we can trust words. His answer is: Just about as far as we can throw them. Many of us are familiar with his suspicion of language, that...

"...vague obscure feeling of being part of something dangerously complex and, so to speak, full of slippery meanings, a whole made up of parts in which each individual is, simultaneously, both one of the parts and the whole of which he is a part."

The one-word description of how Saramago treats words is 'delicacy'. Not just delicacy in written description, but how we as human beings are delicate in our use of words with each other in everyday life. Delicacy is far too delicate for crude philosophical dialectic. In real relationships delicacy doesn't depend on conflict but on appreciation and the holding of conflict in suspension.

Patience not decisiveness is required for delicacy to emerge. It takes time to sweep in and collect what is said with what is unsaid. How so much unsaid in fact goes into making the words that are said. And how much of the unsaid is communicated very effectively indeed through what is said. Delicacy demands a sort of spiritual stance:

"...some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters."

Dogs know this. Which is a good reason for making a dog one of The Cave's central characters. Dogs are able to reduce what are - to humans - complex patterns of speech to simple emotional conditions - happiness, meditativeness, anxiety, frustration - and leave it at that. Dogs have only a limited repertoire in responding to delicacy, however; mainly they just remain attentive to it. Human beings go the step beyond and, at their best, respond delicately to delicacy with remarkable finesse.

Human wordiness is the bridge of relationship, even when, perhaps especially when, words are withheld. Words obviously have power: to move, to instruct, to reconcile. In a sense they are the essence of humanness. Or rather, it is what we do with words that makes us human: we play:

".....what you call playing with words is just a way of making them more visible."

It is when words become invisible, that is indistinguishable from reality, that they become a danger to humanity, and to the rest of the world. Words used indelicately, even unintentionally, can hurt. They can distort what is real, especially by crudely mendacious mis-naming. They can cause unnecessary anxiety, even when they are meaningless, or especially when they are meaningless jargon. In the mouths of those who want to dominate us, they of course can be devastating, perhaps lethal. Saramago makes visible the nonsense of contemporary ad-speak:

"You're our best customer but don't tell your neighbour."

The skill required to make the power and limitations of verbal and written communication visible, and to make them in turn equal with the variety of other symbolic ways we express ourselves, to ourselves as well as to others, is immense:

"Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be of knowing, recognising and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt."

Even greater skill is required to use words to describe these basic skills of controlling language. At this Saramago is an undisputed master. His guiding principle is clear:

"...we must never violate what constitutes the exclusive and essential character of a person, that is, his personality, his way of being, his own unmistakable nature. A character can be full of contradictions, but [it is ] never incoherent..."

It is this basic presumption, that human beings, always and everywhere, are pursuing purpose, even when they appear to be floundering, that is the core of Saramago's work, nowhere better stated than in The Cave. Thus he shows the profound connection between our appreciation of words, aesthetics; and our appreciation of other people, ethics. Remarkable indeed.

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